Things I Wish I Knew About DETOX 25 Years Ago | Doctor Explains

Are you interested in detoxification or detoxification and depuration? I've been doing it in my practice for decades, and these are all of the things that I wish I knew more about 25 years ago. I'm Dr. Andersen. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I talk about holistic and integrative approaches to chronic health issues, among other things. Let's get into the topic of what I wish I knew 25 years ago about detox. So the first thing, which again, all of these things I knew a little bit about, But as they call the practice of medicine practice, you learn things as you go along. The first thing really was something that I didn't realize the gravity of around toxicity and toxicants and depurating somebody and detoxifying somebody. And that is that people are never toxic with just one thing. And so sometimes people will go and they'll get a test done for some toxicity. Let's just, sake of argument, say They get a heavy metal test done and they say, well, it's, you know, really high for just this one metal. And so what that says to us human nature-wise is, oh, well, I've got some toxicity, but it's only one metal. Over the years, various of us in academic situations and in research have done testing with people where you start and you do the baseline test and it shows maybe one or two metals are a problem. Could be chemicals too, or biotoxins like mold, but one or two are high. And then you start to depurate and detoxify that person, and then you wind up seeing— you retest them rather short time in and they're dumping other things. And then you test them another week or two in, and again, this is something you do in research, not in clinical practice so much, but if you do that, then you might find they're dumping other things. And the reason is, is that the testing only tells you about what is available at this moment. It doesn't tell you about how deep the problem is, and it doesn't tell you about all the other things that might be hiding underneath that initial layer that you took with the testing. Problem number one, or issue number one I wish I would have known 25 years ago, is the testing is only as good as the testing is. It's much better than it was back then, but the initial test is just that. It's a snapshot of where you're at today, and it doesn't really tell us all the things that might be going on. Now, there's another aspect to this idea of people are never toxic with one thing. And that is a corollary to what I just talked about, which of course is the initial test may tell you something, and then 3 weeks later when you're detoxifying and doing depuration type of therapies, you might be dumping other things. And that is that sometimes people will get very excited because they get, you know, a heavy metal test done and they'll start to do specific like chelation for heavy metals. What they don't realize is that we're all exposed to not only metals but chemicals and some biotoxins like mold, mycotoxins, And stuff like that, and so then what they don't realize is that as I start to do chelation with you for the metals, for example, the chemicals are going to get stirred up as well, and maybe some of the mold mycotox. And so if I'm only focusing on the metals, and then you start to eliminate, but you're also moving around a whole bunch of say chemical type toxins, and that's not being supported because chelation for metals can have. Components of support for chemicals, but not always all the other components needed. There again, it's not just metals. You start to move everything else. So that's a very important thing. Now, how— that's number one. People are never toxic with just one thing. How have we solved or learned from that over the last 3 decades? Basically, the way we do things now is we take a broader look at the screening tests and we assume if we're going to work on metals, for example, that we're also going to give you support for chemical And mold-type toxins, mycotoxins, et cetera. So it turned out well. But again, I wish that, you know, the 60-some-year-old person who I am now could have gone back in time and told the younger me all about that. Number 2 reason, or number 2 thing that I really would've liked to have known 25 years ago is not that I didn't know this existed, but how critical the axis of elimination between the liver, the gallbladder, and bile So the liver makes the bile. Bile not only helps us digest, but bile also carries a lot of toxins in it. And then that is dumped into the gastrointestinal system. That axis of elimination, it turns out, and we've learned more over time about this, is not just critical for eliminating chemical toxins and a lot of the mycotoxins, biotoxins, but also it's a way that the body sometimes gets rid of excess metals of certain types. And so by adding on therapies, To improve the flow of the bile getting out of the body and maybe bind up the bile so it can leave the body, we actually improve the clinical outcome for the patient, which is very, very important. How did we solve that problem, or what did we learn that you know helped bring us forward these decades later? Well, now just kind of like in the first one where nobody's really toxic with just one thing, any time we start to move toxicity around in the body, whether it's by doing heat therapies like sauna or exercise or specific chelation therapies or other types of therapies, we're going to be supporting that axis of the liver making the bile, the gallbladder storing the bile, and then sending the bile down into the GI tract and then binding up the bile so it can leave. So that includes the idea of substances that are called choleretic and cholagogues. So helping make good bile and helping it move freely. It has to do with binding Substances, which is a huge spectrum. It could be things in your diet, be things in your diet plus some fiber-type things, or it could be things in your diet plus some synthetic type of binders in real bad instances. So again, we've learned over time, and it would've been, you know, better for us to maybe include all of those things 25 years ago. We did to some degree, but I just don't think that we understood really the impact that that has. And What's the positive side of it? Now that we're doing this and we realize point number one, I said I wish I knew no one's just toxic with one problem. Point number two, one of the ways out, you know, of course, is liver bile out in the GI tract. Now that we understand that we're moving more than one thing, we're doing things to make the bile flow better and we're binding up the bile and the toxins. People are experiencing better outcomes with their detoxification. What's the third thing? The third thing in Most parts of medicine, with the exception of emergency medicine, normally is almost universal. And that is in chronic illness, it's not a race, so to speak. And so the thing that I wish someone would have come back and said, uh, is you may have a really good protocol for somebody, but again, not knowing what lies beneath the surface of all the testing that you did, you might go too quickly into the detoxification and depuration therapies, and then the person may just Get sick from it, not feel well. You have to slow down and do other things, and so want to help the patient as quickly as possible. Patient wants to be helped as quickly as possible. That's where this idea of let's get it done as fast as we can comes from. But when it comes to the kind of toxins and toxicants that we're exposed to in the modern world, we all have a lot more than we might imagine in many cases. And if our body is already not feeling well, and so the eliminatory pathways, it may make us real un. comfortable or even a little bit sicker to move toxins around too quickly. Being that it's not a race, there's 2 sides to that coin. One is for the practitioner, we want to do things, you know, in a fast enough manner to get some traction going, but not so fast that we push the patient into an overload situation. But also, it's our job to explain this to the patient who wants to get better immediately, and they can get really frustrated Just like us doctors can get frustrated that things aren't going as quickly as we want. So it's one of those things where you can take a deep breath and realize, yes, while we might do a lot of effort here on the front end and we may have to go slow and ramp up our speed, this is a lifestyle change we're making. It's not an event. This is not a detoxification event of X number of weeks or months. This is maybe X number of weeks or months where we're going to do intensive things, but then For the rest of your life, we wanna keep the door open so this junk keeps moving out. So the big 3, people are never toxic with just one thing. The movement from the liver of bile with all of the toxins associated both into the gallbladder and out into the gut and then out into the stool is way underplayed in historical use of a lot of detox and depuration therapies, although it's always been talked about. And number 3, you don't need to go so fast, at least not in the beginning until you figure out how it's all going to work. So those are the 3 big things I wish I would have known more about. Obviously we knew about it. Wish I would have understood them better 25 years ago. If you liked this video, go up here, check out the other ones that we've tagged here. We've got a bunch of videos on the main YouTube channel, got playlists. I will see you all in the next video.